How about less lipstick and some more jungle?

What to say about "Lipstick Jungle" when the title alone says it all? Power babes duking it out in the big city (because, presumably, if they were rural power babes, lipstick wouldn't figure in so heavily). Me, I'm not so crazy about reducing an entire gender, particularly my own, to a cosmetic. And as for "jungle," well, there's only one power species in the jungle, and that's a cat, a metaphor that just doesn't seem terribly modern, does it?

Granted, there wasn't much NBC could do, since "Lipstick Jungle" was adapted from a novel of the same name, written by Candace Bushnell, who created the newspaper column "Sex and the City," which became that HBO series we've all heard so much about. Why mess with a proven brand?

Well, because "Lipstick Jungle" is to "Sex and the City" what New Coke was to Coca-Cola -- a brand extension best forgotten. Whereas "Sex and the City" minted a genuine, shiny, new modern heroine -- the sexually active, sexually explicit but still romantic good girl -- "Lipstick Jungle" is content to play dress-up with a bunch of frayed-at-the-edges paper dolls. Here's Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields), the nicest movie executive you'll ever meet (she doesn't even swear), dutifully struggling to fill her roles as deal maker, mommy, wife and BFF. Needless to say, she's on the phone a lot.

Working in the same media empire is Nico Reilly (Kim Raver), editor in chief of a hot fashion magazine (is there any other type of magazine these days?). She has a boring college professor husband, a scheming male rival and a nasty male boss (so nasty, in fact, that he tells her straight out that he hopes she will ignore her biological clock because having children makes women lose their focus). All of which puts poor Nico under so much pressure she barely finds time to have an affair with a hot young photographer's assistant, who is (because Nico somehow avoided all those sexual harassment management seminars) working for her.

Meanwhile, the third musketeer, Victory Ford (Lindsay Price), is experiencing a career free fall. Once the hottest (there's that word again) designer around, she's yesterday's news, trying to regain her footing while figuring out how to cope with her latest beau -- Joe Bennett, a semi-reclusive billionaire played by Andrew McCarthy. Who is by far the best thing in the "Jungle."